Chi-Bin Chien: A Tribute

As a child growing up in New Haven, CT and Palo Alto, CA, Chi-Bin Chien was so academically gifted that he skipped straight from the third to the eighth grade and, at the unbelievable age of 12, entered Johns Hopkins University as a Physics major. He was accepted to do graduate work in Physics at Caltech at the age of 15 but was considered too young to enter the program, so he took a fellowship at Cambridge University for a year. At 16, he began his PhD studies with the experimental physicist Jerry Pine, who had recently turned his attention to neurobiology and had pioneered the development of multielectrode arrays for studies of neuronal networks in vitro. Chi-Bin’s gift was not just his scintillating brilliance, because underneath he was a truly motivated scientist who was prepared to take practical and laborious steps to reach a distant goal. In the Pine laboratory, he designed an elegant apparatus that was sensitive enough to measure single action and synaptic potentials in cultured neurons using voltage-sensitive dyes (Chien and Pine, 1991). Consideration of how the neural networks in his experimental dishes made connections with each other sparked Chi-Bin to choose the area of